(3)Vivi vs (10)Donkey Kong 2018
Ulti's Analysis This is one of our coolest contest rivalries ever. I forget who made this point at first, but the history between these two is legitimately amazing. These aren't noble nine characters like Link and Cloud who always just outlast and see each other. This isn't a forced rivalry like Snake vs Knuckles or Sora vs Squall. This is just two characters linked together. That's it. In 2004, Vivi made his debut in a very debated 7 vs 10 match against Donkey Kong. A lot of us, myself included, thought DK could win. Remember, he wasn't yet known as a choke artist. Vivi got 56.47%: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1740-midgar-division-round-1-vivi-vs-donkey-kong Six years later in 2010, these two got matched up in yet another 7 vs 10 match in round one. It was an exact repeat. Remember? https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/3744-chaos-division-round-1-vivi-vs-donkey-kong Vivi got 56.29% in the second match, a whopping .18% deviation. I use this terminology because I remember making a joke back then that I'm looking forward to the trilogy concluding in 2016: https://board8.wikia.com/wiki/(7)Vivi_vs_(10)Donkey_Kong_2010 Turns out my joke prediction was two years off, and these two weren't supposed to see each other this year anyway. Donkey Kong was a 10 seed for the duel yet again, but this time Vivi was a 3. They both had to win twice to get here, which was ok on Vivi's end but DK had to rely on Leon Kennedy shitting the bed in epic fashion to get here. I was hoping DK could make a match out of it this time around, but... nope. We had the literal exact same match for a third time. DK gets the board vote, Vivi wins easily, and I get miffed by the low prediction percentage. Come on, casuals. Your other 7 choices on this half of the division were Yu Narukami, Victor Sullivan, Aya Brea, Tidus, Donkey Kong, Leon Kennedy, and Dragonborn. Who the hell was Vivi losing to on that list? For the actual match, Vivi "only" won with 54.98%. So in 14 years, DK has knocked 1.5% off of there, meaning DK is on pace to win this match in 2069. Seriously. It was nice to see DK do better and prove his run wasn't a fluke, but these small shifts in percentage against the same character prove we're overstating the narrative about DK being legit. In reality, Tidus and Leon Kennedy took massive steps backwards and DK just held steady. Just like Jak's DK did against my Simon Belmont when Nintendo's garbage-ass online functionality gets in the way. Seriously Nintendo, biggest game in over a decade and you still fail at online. Garbage. Buy some servers or fuck off already. Anyway. It was nice seeing these two get a third match that wasn't a blatant setup. I wish DK would have done better, but hey, Vivi is the dude's kryptonite. This was DK's first trip to round 3 since 2002, so of course Vivi was in the way. That's just how it is. Safer777's Analysis After the previous 2 victories of DK we thought it was finally time for him to catch a bandwagon or a rally or something. And finally beat Vivi and advancing! Also Vivi has defeated 2 weak opponents so we couldn't really judge his power. Personally I was with DK too! But guess what? Vivi beat DK. Again. For the 3rd time! First time he won with around 56.5%, 2nd time with around 56% and now with around 55%. That means that in like 10 years DK will win! So does that means that Tidus and Leon are really weak now? Guess so? I mean Vidi did as he did in all previous times so that means that DK hasn't boosted? Maybe? Still nice to see Vivi continue impressing. His look is amazing. I mean he is the typical black mage. Look at him. Even if you don't know about FF you can recognize him as some kind of wizard. Helps that he doesn't show his face too. As for DK...too bad he didn't win. Come on now, imagine if he kept winning. It would be amazing! Just look at this face! Damn! But yeah. So nice win for Vivi. Strange that the main character of FF9 sucks and a party member is so damn strong! FF always wins it seems! The prediction percentage was very low so this at least makes sense. Tsunami's Analysis https://board8.wikia.com/wiki/Vivi_vs_Donkey_Kong I thought it was worth making during the contest, so I did. Through the first two rounds, we were wondering how much Donkey Kong had truly boosted. Unless Vivi also boosted, the answer is "probably not by as much as we thought". This was Donkey Kong's best outing against Vivi, but it still wasn't anywhere near what his first two rounds would suggest. Also, https://board8.wikia.com/wiki/Pikachu_vs_Tidus_vs_Leon_Kennedy_vs_Vivi_Ornitier_2007. That's all three of DK's opponents this year in the same match. At the time this match happened, it looked like there was a chance that if DK won this match, he could make it all four members of that match. After all, given DK's past history, if he made it past Vivi, it would signify a legitimate boost, to the point that he probably would stand a chance against Ganondorf. Then DK-Pikachu would most likely occur in Losers' 1, or possibly Losers' 2 if they both managed to upset Mega Man but the idea of a DK > MM upset seemed fairly inconceivable so it would really come down to whether or not Pikachu could beat Mega Man. But of course DK couldn't get past Vivi, so this mostly just served to show how far Leon had fallen. Did you actually follow the link to that 2007 match? Leon came out in first place, with 33.31%. Hard to imagine him even getting that percentage in a 1v1 against Pikachu nowadays. But let's take the comparisons to 2007 a bit further, because there's still a point to be made. That match I linked to above was a round two match. This was one of the Round 1 matches that fed into it: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2886-division-6-round-1-leon-ridley-spyro-vivi. Now, aside from the bit where a character with no contest wins outside of Rivalry Rumble where a Noble Niner was carrying him manages to comfortably spank a character that has one (albeit only one which came in the watered-down 2013 field) for third place, the key thing to note here is that even without Tidus LFFing him, Vivi lost to Leon. As such, unlike in 2010 where the casuals had no excuse for Vivi having only a 39.95% prediction percentage (not even a full 5% better than the initial match in 2004!), they can actually be excused for dropping nearly two-thirds of Vivi's R2 prediction percentage here (65.96% of brackets had him making it to this match but only 22.96% had him winning it). He was, by all rights, the underdog in this match pre-contest, except the favorite ended up eliminated a round earlier. ...Maybe. DK was the favorite with the casuals in Round 1, though not with the Gurus, and his Round 2 prediction percentage, while under 50%, was more than half his Round 1 prediction percentage--and more than half of Leon's Round 1 prediction percentage. Which means that DK might have had the plurality of brackets in the Tidus/DK/Leon/Dragonborn fourpack. Which would mean that there's...maybe less excuse? Heck, once you consider the fact that Vivi had a 65.96% prediction percentage in R2 and DK only had a 38.06%, but the percentages fell in such a way to make it look like that was a plurality...it's possible, if unlikely, that the casuals were so split on DK's fourpack that Vivi's 22.96% is actually the plurality. Unlikely, because that still leaves 77.04% to mostly be split among DK's fourpack (the other three members of Vivi's fourpack will probably take a little bit, but not much). If we give about 3% to the other three members of Vivi's fourpack, DK's fourpack would be averaging about 18.5% apiece. Given that Dragonborn barely had twice that to get out of Round 1...yeah, I doubt Vivi was even the technical favorite here. Though it does bring up another intriguing possibility, that DK was the favorite in his fourpack but Leon was the technical favorite in the eightpack due to being perceived as having a greater chance at getting past Vivi. It would only serve to underscore the fact that transitivity is not a thing in these contests. Hell, just look at Bowser/Yoshi/Luigi. Category:2018 Contest Matches